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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Noah Levine rejected the spiritual path of his father, Stephen, and then, many tattoos later, joined him.
Nov 19, 2002 | It's Friday night in San Francisco and a crowd has gathered at the Justice League, a cavern on a dirty stretch of Divisadero Street, for an evening of punk rock, old (Slaughter and the Dogs) and new (the Belltones). The local scene, always less violent than L.A.'s and less arty than New York's, wins points for endurance. Looking out over the river of mohawks, porkpies and D.A.s, you could swear it was 1977.
Among the faithful tonight are the Dharma Punx, a loose affiliation of friends who share a love of punk rock and a penchant for spiritual practice. In S.F., home to gay conservatives and pacifist policemen, spiritual punks hardly raise a pierced eyebrow. The Justice League doorman waves them in like the regulars they are. There's Mike Haber, who was the leader of a rockabilly motorcycle gang in Santa Cruz, Calif., before sobering up and discovering meditation; and Lars Frederiksen, the clean-and-sober member of the stalwart S.F. punk band Rancid, as well as a new group called the Bastards; and Lars' roommate, Noah Levine, a former drunk, drug addict and jailbird who now brings Buddhist teaching into jails and juvenile halls, when he's not out seeing shows.
Levine is the glue that holds the crew together. With his shaved head, gold teeth and neck-to-navel tattoos he could be standard issue street punk -- until you notice that among the images adorning his arms are those of Buddha and Krishna, and instead of "hate" and "love" tattooed across the knuckles of his hands, he's got "wisdom" and "compassion." ("Same thing," he shrugs when I ask him about it later.) And despite his gentle manner, his drug-and-alcohol-free status, the locals don't treat him like a wimp.
"Some of the people in the Dharma Punx are some of the oldest punks in the scene," he tells me outside the club. "At 31, I've been coming to punk shows for 18 years. It's not like some Buddhist guy coming in and trying to infiltrate a scene. This has been my scene my whole life."
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Levine's "whole life" did not promise to be a long-running show at first. Despite a privileged middle-class upbringing and a famous spiritual teacher (Stephen Levine) for a father, he seemed ready for an early grave in his teen years, or at best a life behind bars. "I had friends who had done time there," he says of San Quentin, "so the first time I walked out in the yard there were all these kinds of images: This is what my brothers, my friends had to deal with.
"But I also felt like, this is my population, these are my peers. But for this interesting turn of fate -- but for the grace of the universe, for lack of a better word -- I ended up getting out of this. But I was headed on a nonstop train to prison for several years."
Levine doesn't spend all his time at punk clubs and prisons. Sometimes he can be found at spiritual retreats such as Marin County's center for Buddhist study, Spirit Rock (where he has led teen and family meditation groups) or New York's Omega Institute. These are familiar scenes for Levine, despite his brush with prison. His father is a star in these circles. His books on death and grieving ("Who Dies?" and "A Gradual Awakening"), often written in collaboration with his wife (and Noah's stepmother), Ondrea, have sold over a million copies.
But like any good adolescent, Noah did not have time for his father or his "practice" when he was growing up. "As our youngest child, Noah, dutifully rebelled, he rejected 'meditation and the lot,'" Stephen Levine wrote in a personal memoir, "Embracing the Beloved." "Having mutinied with considerable energy and originality in our youth, we could not imagine how he might 'get to us' as we had 'gotten' our parents ... Until the afternoon he came home from school with a tattoo and nailed me."
Says Noah, "As soon as I heard punk rock, when I was 11 years old, I knew that I had found my tribe." Bouncing around between his father's home in a remote part of New Mexico and his mother's place in Santa Cruz, Noah began to alienate himself to the tune of the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag. With his parents' blessing, he declared himself "emancipated" at age 16, "with the intention to be on my own," he recalls. "But I couldn't get my shit together so I was still on my mom's couch."
